The Myth of the Lost Cause

Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won

Edward H. Bonekemper

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781621574736
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

History isn't always written by the winners... Twenty-first-century controversies over Confederate monuments attest to the enduring significance of our nineteenth-century Civil War. As Lincoln knew, the meaning of America itself depends on how we understand that fratricidal struggle. As soon as the Army of Northern Virginia laid down its arms at Appomattox, a group of Confederate officers took up their pens to refight the war for the history books. They composed a new narrative—the Myth of the Lost Cause—seeking to ennoble the sacrifice and defeat of the South, which popular historians in the twentieth century would perpetuate. Unfortunately, that myth would distort the historical imagination of Americans, north and south, for 150 years. In this balanced and compelling correction of the historical record, EdwardBonekemper helps us understand the Myth of the Lost Cause and its effect on the social and political controversies that are still important to all Americans.

CHAPTER ONECHAPTER ONE

THE MYTH OF THE LOST CAUSETHE MYTH OF THE LOST CAUSE

Winners write the history of wars. So it is said. Confederate Major General Patrick Cleburne agreed: “Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.” It did not work out quite that way.

To the contrary, a coterie of disappointed Southerners, aided by many other “conveniently forgetful” and “purposely misleading”¹ comrades, spent three decades after the Civil War creating the Myth of the Lost Cause.² They “nurtured a public memory of the Confederacy that placed their wartime sacrifice and shattering defeat in the best possible light.”³ They formed the Southern Historical Society in 1868–1869 and published fifty-two volumes of papers dealing almost exclusively with Civil War experiences and memories. The society—which some say should have been called the Confederate Historical Society—and its published papers became the chief means of propagating the Myth of the Lost Cause.⁴ The Myth is a collection of fictions, lies, and component myths that purport to explain why much of the South seceded from the Union and why the Confederacy lost the Civil War. It is important to understand because that Myth came to dominate the historiography of the Civil War for most of the next 150 years. Alan Nolan commented that “the purpose of the legend was to hide the Southerners’ tragic and self-destructive mistake. . . . The victim of the Lost Cause legend has been history, for which the legend has been substituted in the national memory.”⁵

As early as 1871, the former slave Frederick Douglass expressed his concern about the revival of secessionism in the South, describing “the spirit of secession” as “a deeply rooted, devoutly cherished sentiment, inseparably identified with the ‘lost cause,’ which the half measures of the Government towards the traitors has helped to cultivate and strengthen.”⁶

By 1880, the Myth had become apparent to Abraham Lincoln’s former secretaries and official biographers:

By the time [John] Nicolay and [John] Hay began their writing in earnest, roughly fifteen years after the collapse of the Confederacy, prominent Southerners had already begun crafting a new narrative—one that would afford their people a modicum of self-respect in the wake of devastating defeat and inspire Northerners to embrace a revisionist history in which everyone was right and no one was wrong. In these efforts, the progenitors of America’s reunion romance achieved considerable success.⁷

Their view is supported by Gary Gallagher, who concludes that “because the Confederacy lost so unequivocally, its citizens probably devoted more energy to [creating a “suitable public memory”] than their Northern counterparts.” Creators of the Myth “succeeded to a remarkable degree” in “shaping how Americans have assessed and understood the Civil War.”⁸

The Myth was developed during Reconstruction as shell-shocked and impoverished Southerners tried to rationalize the institution of slavery and the heroic performance of Confederate leaders and soldiers. As W. J. Cash explains,

[I]t is probably no exaggeration to say [Southerners] were to become in Reconstruction years the most sentimental people in history. . . . [The] Southern legend . . . moved, more powerfully even than it moved toward splendor and magnificence, toward a sort of ecstatic, teary-eyed vision of the Old South as Happy-Happy Land. This legend is most perfectly rendered in the tone of Thomas Nelson Page’s Billy as he dreams of the old plantation. And of course the sentimentality waxed fat on the theme of the Confederate soldier and the cause for which he had fought and died. . . . And men (Western men, at least) have everywhere and eternally sentimentalized the causes of their wars and particularly the causes that were lost. All of them have bled for God and Womanhood and Holy Right; no one has ever died for anything so crass and unbeautiful as the preservation of slavery. But I doubt that the process has ever elsewhere been carried to the length to which it was carried in the South in this time. . . .⁹

The Myth, writes Gallagher, “addressed the nature of antebellum Southern society and the institution of slavery, the constitutionality of secession, the causes of the Civil War, the characteristics of their wartime society, and the reasons for their defeat.”¹⁰ It originated with Generals Jubal Early and William Nelson Pendleton¹¹ and was promulgated in memoirs, veterans’ reunion speeches, ceremonies at Confederate cemeteries and elsewhere, and Confederate-themed art.

In his analysis of myths surrounding Robert E. Lee, Alan Nolan sees a broader problem: “The distortions of fact that mark the Lee tradition are not unique in Civil War history; on the contrary, they are suggestive of a larger and more widespread problem. Fiction—in the form of misinterpretation or the form of outright misrepresentation—is endemic to the study of the history of the Civil War. . . . Touching on almost all aspects of the struggle, these fictions have ousted the facts and gained wide currency, so that what is treated as history of the Civil War is instead a legend, a folk epic told over and over again.”¹²

What exactly are the primary components of the full-blown Myth of the Lost Cause? Broadly speaking, the Myth consists of the following contentions:

1. Slavery was a benevolent institution for all involved but was dying by 1861. There was therefore no need to abolish slavery suddenly, especially by war.

2. States’ rights, not slavery, was the cause of secession and the establishment of the Confederacy and thus of the Civil War.

3. The Confederacy had no chance of winning the Civil War and did the best it could with the limited resources it had.

4. Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederates to a near-victory, was one of the greatest generals in history.

5. James Longstreet caused Lee to lose the Battle of Gettysburg and thus the Civil War.

6. Ulysses S. Grant was an incompetent “butcher” who won the war only by brute force and superior numbers.

7. The Union won the war by waging unprecedented and precedent-setting “total war.”

Is the Lost Cause still important? David W. Blight observes,

The Lost Cause tradition—as both a version of history and as a racial ideology—is still certainly very much alive in neo-Confederate organizations, on numerous Web sites, among white supremacist groups, in staunch advocates of the Confederate battle flag, and even among some mainstream American politicians. Multitudes still cannot bring themselves to confront the story of slavery as both lived experience and the central cause of the Civil War.¹³

Another historian, Gordon Rhea, the great-grandson of a Confederate company commander, urges readers to ignore the myths about the war and focus on contemporary evidence:

Our ancestors were unapologetic about why they wanted to secede; it is up to us to take them at their word and dispassionately form our own judgments about their actions. This is a discussion we Southerners need to have. The Sesquicentennial affords us an opportunity to insist on a fact-based dialogue about the wellsprings of secession, a dialogue based on what the participants said at the time, not what they and their apologists said later to justify their actions to posterity. We are a diverse people with a wide array of opinions. I am very happy that the Confederacy lost the Civil War, and I believe that the Confederacy’s stated goals and ideology should offend the sensibility of anyone living in our times. We ought to be able to look history squarely in the face and call it for what it was. Only by discarding the myths of the past can we move forward to an honest future.¹⁴

One of the most popular narrative histories of the Civil War continues to perpetuate the Myth of the Lost Cause, laments the historian Michael Dyson: “Let’s be honest: Shelby Foote’s view that Lincoln injected slavery as an issue into the Civil War to gain tactical advantage over the South is just too close for comfort to the idea that all the bloodshed was more about states’ rights than whether we should continue to shackle black humanity. Foote’s Civil War trilogy unabashedly tilted toward the Confederacy and can be read as a monumental brief in behalf of the Southern view of the Late Unpleasantness.”¹⁵

Part and parcel of the Myth was a deliberate cover-up of the anti-black evils of Reconstruction. One ex-Confederate soldier, the popular Southern writer George Washington Cable, found himself blackballed because of his criticism of the new Jim Crow system and refusal to stick to picturing the supposed romance and harmony of antebellum plantation life.¹⁶

The primary focus, however, was on sanitizing the history of the Civil War itself. The well-known series of books Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, published in the 1880s, was deliberately not titled Men and Events of the Civil War because, as one of its editors told his staff, “‘Events’ might seem as if we were going into, say, the condition & action of the freedmen—the Emancipation Proclamation—& other events not connected with battles.” His co-editor agreed to exclude all political issues. As Joshua Zeitz concludes, “Thus sanitized of race, ideology, or partisanship, the result was pleasing to all concerned [Northern and Southern readers].”¹⁷

In the first two decades of the 1900s, Charles Beard and other Progressive historians contended that the Civil War was an inevitable conflict between the industrial North and the agrarian South, a conflict in which slavery played only an ancillary role. In the following decades, Frank L. Owsley, Avery Craven, and James G. Randall denied the role of slavery in causing the war, blamed the war on radical politicians and editors, and painted an idea...